A thank you letter that made me laugh out loud

This week I received a thank you letter from a Portsmouth Middle School student who recently toured Seacoast Media Group that was so unusual it made me laugh out loud.

Howard Altschiller

This week I received a thank you letter from a Portsmouth Middle School student who recently toured Seacoast Media Group that was so unusual it made me laugh out loud.

Here at SMG, I'm the guy who gives the tours. I have given hundreds of them since we moved into our new headquarters at Pease for groups ranging from Cub Scout packs trying to earn their journalism merit badges to senior citizens who come to my Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) classes.

For Cub Scouts, the highlight of the tour is definitely the elevator, the water fountain and asking me things like: "Why do you have gray hair?"

I can also keep them entertained trying to guess which photographer is really Spider-Man and which reporter is Superman.

I enjoy giving the tours because we have a great story to tell. The minute I open the press room doors our young visitors say "Whoa," and our adult visitors say "I had no idea you guys were such a big company."

I'm proud to show off our $7 million Goss Magnum 8 press, which can print 50,000 papers an hour. Visitors love to watch the press run — to see rolls of blank newsprint rotate over plated cylinders, picking up type and images, traveling down the folder and then overhead until they drop into to the stacker where they are strapped and placed on pallets for transport.

I love the looks on their faces when they see 3,000-pound barrels of blue, red and yellow ink and the 15,000-gallon black ink tank. I always make the same joke: "This is where I bring the politicians so they can see we really do buy our ink by the barrel."

I love the looks on our guests' faces when they enter the newsprint storage room where hundreds of 1,000-pound rolls of newsprint are stacked from floor to ceiling, a veritable mountain range of paper, and they are shocked when I tell them it represents just a 10-day supply — a model of efficient inventory control.

I'm proud to bring them into the circulation depot and describe how after midnight it becomes a hive of activity with hundreds of drivers picking up papers to deliver across the Seacoast.

And, of course, I'm proud of our news team.

Our digital news editor, Glenn Sabalewski, who is in charge of news on Seacoastonline, tells me I'm beginning to sound like a comedian who tells the same jokes over and over because after we leave the press I take our visitors to his desk and say: "You see this one guy here? Everything you just saw in the pressroom, all those pressmen, mailroom workers, delivery drivers, all that expensive equipment? This guy can reach nearly as many readers just by clicking a few boxes on his computer!"

Highlights in the newsroom include court and cops reporter Elizabeth Dinan's police scanner, the police log and her photo of a defendant being led handcuffed into court wearing a blue T-shirt emblazoned with yellow letters that read: "I hate The Portsmouth Herald."

On April 8 and 9, I led tours of Portsmouth Middle School students who asked great questions and were honestly engaged. They were here for World of Work Week and one of them, Braxton Holloway, was so interested he came back and did a job shadow with Elizabeth. She had him rewrite a police press release and took him out to a fire on Newington Road in Greenland.

In his thank you letter, Braxton wrote: "Hey, it's me, the kid who wanted to work over at SMG. Thank you so, so, so much! You're awesome and you really helped spark my interest."

A card signed by Samantha had this poetic line: "I liked watching the papers fly like birds down the machine."

But the letter that made me laugh out loud was signed with an illegible flourish that looks like a horizontal tornado.

"Dear Mr. Altschiller, I really liked the tour you led us on because I know more about reporters and what they do. Your suit was pretty dope, was that Brooks Brothers or Banana Republic, I'm not sure. Sincerely,"

That letter alone inspires me to give 100 more tours.

Howard Altschiller is Seacoast Media Group's executive editor. He can be reached at haltschiller@seacoastonline.com.

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